Music Blogs

The 1989 debut album by Manchester's Stone Roses is widely regarded as one of the greatest ever made. Along with Shaun Ryder's Happy Mondays, the Roses' Byrds-on-Esctasy sound turned the city of the Smiths and Joy Division into the bacchanalian metropolis known as "Madchester." Simon Reynolds interviewed the band for Melody Maker in that "second summer of love"--herewith an excerpt from his piece.--Barney Hoskyns, Editorial Director, Rock's Backpages

The Stone Roses are the latest installment in the resurrection insurrection. You know the argument by now: "perfect pop" usually denotes a desperately faint echo of a past that cannot be surpassed, only nodded to with sad-eyed, elegiac deference, but there's a precious few who make the dream of "perfect pop" blaze true. Last year, The House Of Love were the classicist exponents of this alchemy, My Bloody Valentine and Loop the most incendiary. This year, the Stone Roses are the sole new recruits so far in sight.

Hendrix, early Floyd, Lowe, the Beatles, are all present, but not as "sources" or "reference points", rather as fuel to the furnace of a transcendent and truly distinct identity. And there are suggestions of a "future" as well as a "golden age" on the debut album. "I Wanna Be Adored" begins as a dub cavalcade through shroud after shroud of AR Kanish wraith-guitar. "Don't Stop" is its preceding song, "Waterfall," played backwards, and it sounds like weir cascading upwards in sheer defiance. What could have been a mere period piece, is actually one of the most sacramental things you'll hear this year, a shrine-in-the-sky.

The record's great, live is something else again. The Stone Roses have a live presence that's mesmeric, from singer Ian Brown's stark-staring eyes and microphone-wanking arrogance, to effects-man Cressa's freaky dancing. They're far out and they're gonna go far.

The Stone Roses' domain is the bittersweet--"the sweet ache" of poignancy, "cruel beauty"--but it takes a while before you realize just how citrus-sharp the bitter in their bittersweet is, before you wince at the acrid undercurrents of violence beneath the sugar-spun surface. Brutal put-downs of discarded lovers, outlandish fantasies of revenge, images of arson and stoning people to death, abound. "Shoot You Down" has a chorus that goes "I'd love to do it/And you know you've always had it coming." But it seems I'm well off the mark when I suggest to Ian Brown and guitarist John Squire, that the specter of misogyny may possibly be rearing an ugly head...

John: "What do you think of women? Are you misogynist?"

Ian: "The song about stoning someone is 'Bye Bye Bad man'."

So what is it about?

John: "Insurrection."

You feel a lot of rage?

"Yeah, a lot of things make me mad."

But what about "I Am The Resurrection"--"You're a no good washed-up baby who'd look better dead"?

Ian: "Some people would look better dead. It's not about a woman though. 'Today's the day she swore to steal what she never could own/And race from this hole you call home.' You only have to listen to 'Waterfall' to know that anything else on the album couldn't have any misogynist connotations."

Maybe misogyny's the wrong word. But your songs do seem to run a gamut from utter idealism to bitter disillusion...

John: "Those are the limits, yeah."

Do you particularly favor the contradiction of sweet surfaces cloaking vicious feelings?

Ian: "We once wanted to call ourselves the Angry Young Teddy Bears. Someone wrote once that we were Teddy Bears capable of a nasty bite."

"Made Of Stone," "Elephant Stone," stoning to the death--where does the stone fetish come from?

"A Japanese journalist told us she thought we were trying to subconsciously hypnotize people by using the word 'stone.'"

Petrify them?

John: "The word 'I' turns up and more often than the word 'stone'. So we're self-obsessed masons, maybe."

Ian: "We're all made of stone, aren't we? Or we might as well be."

Why do you say that?

"So many twats about. Tense people."

And you see yourself as un-tense?

"We're not tense at all." It's true, they seem tranquil verging on catatonic. In case you haven't guessed, I should explain that Ian and John, inseparable friends since the age of 11 and the creative core of the group, are laconic in the extreme, soft-spoken to the point of near-inaudibility, and wear an almost tangible aura of not suffering fools gladly.

"The tense people," continues John, "are the people who make money for the sake of it, and f**k people over in the process. That's the main problem."

Do you have political ideals, or al least notions of how you'd like things to be?

John: "Yeah, everybody should be a millionaire. Everybody on the planet."

Ian: "You can't help it, can you? We drive into London and we just turn off the motorway and we see people living under a bridge. What's it all about?"

Do you feel antagonism towards the South, see it as the fount of all the evil in this country?

Ian: "No, not at all. I think that's dangerous, that North/South divide. It's a dumb generalization. People are people, and your attitude's your attitude. There's a lot of pro-Mancunian people: you do a gig in London and you get people from Coventry or Southampton chanting 'Manchester, Manchester.' But there are a lot of wankers in Manchester."

You have no truck with the idea of a Manchester spirit, a grand tradition of obstreperous outsiders like the Fall, the Smiths, New Order?

Ian: "It's this theme of Manchester as grey and moping, this whole poverty-as-romance idea. It's rubbish. The sick thing is that people read that and take up that sort of lifestyle. Sit alone in a bedsit and mope. That scene was set up by Joy Division and New Order."

Thinking again about the songs on the album, it seems like almost all of them are so ambiguous you could take them as either poisoned love songs or political tirades. But "Elizabeth, My Dear..." is pretty explicit: "it's curtains for you/Elizabeth, my dear..."

Ian: "We're all anti-royalist, anti-patriarch. Cos it's 1989. Time to get real. When the ravens leave The Tower, England shall fall, they say. We want to be there shooting the ravens."

John: "Just a bunch of cattle-rustlers, the royal family."